The laughter stopped.
“Why would we kill Harry? You can’t collect a debt from a dead man,” Nick said.
“So, he still owed you money?” I replied.
“Yes. And a lot of it. That’s why we had to go and cook up Steve’s little caravan park. He was the guarantor of sorts. Your man John here lit the match.”
I turned to look at John, and he nodded slightly, letting me know it was true. John had a much more intimate relationship with the Broadheads than he’d initially expressed. He was clearly working with them, and now, I had no one to turn to for help. Damien reached into a large toolbox, producing a tyre wrench, clasping it with both hands. He gave a knowing nod to Nick who then turned back to me.
“Now, we can’t have you running around asking questions, so we’ll have to put a stop to that,” Nick said menacingly.
Damien started walking over to me, almost in slow motion, delicately patting his free hand with the large piece of steel he was holding in the other. I knew exactly what was coming. He was going to take it and crack my skull open with it. My heart had stopped beating entirely, and I was in free fall, waiting for the inevitable impact. Just as he entered striking distance, my self-preservation instinct kicked in.
“Stop!” I screamed, “I’m pregnant.”
Damien had stopped in his tracks, staring at Nick for some direction. I could hear John pacing around behind me. All three men were just looking at one another, not knowing what to do next.
The funniest bit about it was that it was true.
What a cruel joke. I’d finally given Harry what he so desperately wanted, and he wasn’t around to see it. As planned, I went to the clinic appointment the morning of Harry’s death, and it was there that I was given the news. Even though the pregnancy was very much planned at the time, it still filled me with dread. Harry wasn’t at the appointment, of course, and I tried desperately to get hold of him on the phone, though the calls never went through. When I found out he’d died, it sounded crazy, but I’d convinced myself I wasn’t pregnant. I couldn’t cope with that on top of everything else. I cradled my stomach lightly and rose to my feet.
“You don’t have to do this. I don’t care about you or anything illegal you’ve been doing. I just want to know what you know about Harry. That’s all.”
“I’m not killing a pregnant woman, Nick,” Damien uttered.
“John is going to take you back now. You keep our names out of your mouth, you hear? Or we’ll find you,” Nick warned.
“You still haven’t told me about Harry,” I said sternly.
“Are you taking the piss?” Nick stormed closer, his forehead almost touching mine, “We let you walk out of here unharmed, and you ask more questions?”
“Come on, love,” John said, delicately gripping my arm, “we need to leave.”
John led me out of the warehouse, the way we came, and to his car. He opened the passenger door to usher me inside. I’d risked my life and that of my unborn child, and for what? A few crumbs of information that I already knew. John got back in the car, and I remained staring into space.
“Are you actually pregnant?” John asked.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Why haven’t you told anyone?”
“It never came up.”
“You should have said earlier. I wouldn’t have let you go in there if I knew.”
“Well, you know now.”
“Is it Harry’s?”
“Of course. It’s Harry’s,” I snapped.
“I’ll drive you back. We’re going to have to tell Yvonne, you know.”
Throughout the journey back I felt sick to my bones. I hadn’t even accepted it truly myself. I’d just blurted it out in the heat of the moment to save my own skin without so much as thinking about the repercussions of Yvonne knowing. She would now feel some kind of claim on my body, there mere thought of which made me wince. John started the car, and we began the journey back to Filey. We hadn’t exchanged words with each other for about thirty minutes. John looked as if it was business as usual, although my heart rate was still going through the roof.
Harry wasn’t the kind of person who would go to them for money. He was a financial adviser for a start, and he’d never had a fight in his life. We should have been able to tell each other anything, but for some unknown reason, he was withholding all these financial secrets that he was involved in from his wife. Just meeting the Broadheads was enough to make me terrified of ever returning, but he actually did take money from them. I couldn’t fathom what was going through his head when he agreed to that or why he did it in the first place.
“You must know more about Harry,” I said.
“Listen, love. You need to let it go. The Broadheads had nothing to do with it.”
“Fine. So, tell me what happened.”
John stopped the car abruptly next to a farmer’s field and turned the engine off. He turned to me with a sigh, obviously weighing up the pros and cons of what he was about to say. I waited patiently.
“Not a word of any of this to Yvonne, deal?” He said.
“Deal.”
“Any of it. The meeting went fine, I’m not involved, and they didn’t have anything to do with it. No leads.”
“Fine.”
John sighed and leaned back in the seat slightly, returning eye contact intermittently. I could see he was obviously wrestling with the idea of letting me on something that he might know.
“Yvonne is going to kill me if I tell you,” John reasoned.
“John. Seriously, spit it out,” I said.
